Not saying we shouldn't do anything about this drug epidemic but your comparison is fundamentally unsound.
Moreover, addiction is fundamentally a disease which acts upon the sufferer's ability to make free, rational decisions. In a very real sense, the addiction itself is "infringing on the freedom" of the addict, even if it hasn't killed them yet.
No, the point of the lawsuit is that they don't (or didn't). The article makes that clear through quotes such as: "We believe that the evidence will show that these pharmaceutical companies purposely misled doctors about the dangers connected with pain meds that they produced."
> Nobody cares about smokers getting addicted although they do care about public smoking because it infringes on their right to clean air.
Public smoking is a focus of conversation today, but the analogous 1990s big tobacco lawsuits centered on the medical costs of treating smokers. See wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
Perhaps. But it's virtually a certainty that opioid overdoses will kill tens of thousands of people in the US this year. (The most reliable recent figure I can find was ~30k in 2015.) Meanwhile, a terrorist attack in the US that kills hundreds of people -- let alone tens of thousands -- is a relatively low-probability event...